At the Huffington Post, Gene Demby says that the president is struggling with white support, and he puts the issue in statistical and historical perspective.

It's an electoral problem that is especially pronounced for Obama. No president has won the White House with a smaller sliver of the white vote. The president's approval among white voters has dropped below 40 percent, and he trails Mitt Romney with that group by 13 percentage points.

(Even young white voters, a group that largely supported the president in 2008, have proven a tough sell. From 2008 to 2011, about 18 percent of young white voters shifted from Democrat to Republican, according to Pew.)

"President Obama does not currently have enough white support to win re-election, even if he retains his minority base from 2008," wrote David Paul Kuhn at Real Clear Politics. Obama won about 43 percent of the white vote in 2008, but needs about 38 percent of the white vote to win this fall, according to one pollster. (Obama pulled in 80 percent of the non-white vote in 2008.)

On the other side of the ledger, though, are Mitt Romney's poor poll numbers among white voters. Romney needs to be at about 60 percent of white voters to win in November, and he's currently winning just over half.

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